1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure is related to a cardiac image rendering technology, more particularly to a system capable of providing an operator to select any specific chamber (a left atrium, a left ventricular, a right atrium or a right ventricular) from a heart from a three-dimension (3D) cardiac image or dataset (such as a CT or MRI image), and reconstruct the slices of the selected chamber and then unwrap into 2D map image display with pre-defined landmarks used for reference points by a mapping manner, and a method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heart diseases are generally classified as the diseases caused by the problem in intrinsic anatomic/functional abnormalities and the diseases caused by the problem in heart rhythms, the former is a kind of heart diseases caused by abnormal heart structure, for example, coronary heart diseases, valvular heart diseases, congenital heart diseases, cardiomyopathy, or heart failure; the latter includes supraventricular heart arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation (AF), ventricular tachycardia and so on. The heart chamber most likely has anatomical remodeling (such as change of chamber wall thickness or altered chamber volume) before any clinical symptom of any kind of heart diseases. Slice images of the heart can be obtained by using 3D-based medical imaging modalities, such as computed tomography (CT) modality or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modality, and extent of morphological changes or alterations of the heart can be identified or even quantified from the slice images. However, the slice images are grayscale and no obvious delineations between regions of architectural changes or any given chambers adjacent to each other can be steadily shown in the slice image. Though a very drastic change of the heart chamber can be obviously observed or recognized in the sectional image, but it could be challenging to intuitively interpret detailed or regional morphological information or spatial information (such as gross morphology of single heart chamber, local myocardial wall thickness of single heart chamber, wall thickness heterogeneity, or comparison between morphology changes at different times) on the slice images. However, above-mentioned information carries fundamental basis for early detection of disease onset and recognition of disease course evolution and remodeling for heart diseases. While most of current medical imaging modalities have the basic function of generating 3D or 4D format for clinical use, image-based information overload and burden may sometimes result in more complex and excessive clinical data in return, with certain degree of misjudgment. On the other hand, some key information can not be displayed and elaborated very well in an efficient way. In particular, for morphological descriptions of any single heart chamber or structural entity, current 3D- or 4D-based image analysis results cannot meet the requirement for clinic purpose.